Ice skating at the Midway Ice Rink

December 31, 2008

The First Clothesline?

The Wall Street Journal ("Veggie Gardens and Other Ideas for the Obamas: Advocates Are Pushing Bushels of Suggestions; Clothesline for a Day", January 17-18, 2009) reports that all kinds of kooks and zealots for one cause or another are hard at work, lobbying and advocating for an Obama White House embrace of their passion:

Ben Davis, a marketing entrepreneur in San Francisco, has gathered more than 800 signatures on a petition to encourage the Obamas to install a clothesline at the White House, for at least one day. "It would send a signal to the nation and world that reducing energy consumption is patriotic and that line-drying one's laundry is part of the acceptable social fabric of our nation." Alexander Lee, a leader of that movement and founder of a group called Project Laundry List, in Concord, N.H., points to a photo taken around 1910 that suggests there was once a clothesline at the White House.

This comes on the heels of an article in the New York Times (December 4, 2008) which included Laura Bush's remark that the East Room of the White House used to contain Abigail Adams' clothesline.

Way to go! Installing a nice T-style clothesline on the White House grounds would surely send a message.....but what would it mean?

Ice skating.....the real deal

The New York Times reported that the canals in the Netherlands froze over for the first time in years, bringing young and old, Dutch and not, onto the ice. People blame climate change and other factors for the nonfreezing years, but everyone seemed happy in this photo.

This Economist Goes Centro!

Newsflash: this economist can now do the laundry in her new high efficiency washing machine! Wheee! Here's a photo, taken with my new Centro (OK, so it's not a great camera)--



Yep, I finally took the plunge and bought a new phone--another smartphone by Palm, this one called the Centro. AT&T was giving the phones away, so I took one (had to take blue, as the black phones were all gone!). It was surprisingly easy to set it up, update new desktop software, and even sync to get all my old info (from my Treo 650) to my new device. I even added email capabilities (via gmail). Too bad I ended up with a corrupted address book file that caused me 4 hours of headaches today (featuring hot sync troubles, uninstalling and reinstalling software, soft resets, hard resets, etc.), all finally resolved by a patient tech support person in 45 minutes on the phone.